Moira Crone

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Moira Crone (born 1952) is an American painter and writer. She was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and grew up in the tobacco country of eastern North Carolina. Crone has written three short‑story collections and two novels. Her fiction is often described as Southern Gnostic, with spiritual overtones and a focus on small‑town life. Critics compare her to Flannery O’Connor for the spiritual dimension and to Sherwood Anderson for her characters and sense of place. She taught fiction writing at Louisiana State University, where she led the MFA Program in Creative Writing and is now Professor Emerita, and she also worked as a fiction editor for the University Press of Mississippi. Crone lives in New Orleans with her husband, poet and author Rodger Kamenetz, and their two daughters, Anya and Kezia.

Literary career
Crone’s first book, The Winnebago Mysteries (1982), was praised by John Barth as “a pure delight.” The story Kudzu, set in tobacco country with a frustrated father, foreshadowed her later work in What Gets Into Us. Her debut novel A Period of Confinement (1985) was named new and noteworthy by The New York Times, which called it a debut that makes you sit up and pay attention. The novel follows Alma Taylor, a young artist who experiences confinement after love, pregnancy, marriage, and a move to New York. In the early 1980s Crone moved to Louisiana and wrote stories set in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, including Oslo, which appeared in The New Yorker. The collection Dream State gathered many Louisiana stories and was praised by The New York Times Book Review for its fresh, vivid take on the Deep South. What Gets Into Us, Crone’s next collection, returns to her North Carolina roots, depicting life in a small town across racial and class lines from the 1950s to the present. PopMatters described it as a complex, lyrical, and visionary work with moments of redemption amid darkness. In 2012 she published The Not Yet, which Publishers Weekly called an impressive genre debut with a strong voice; the book was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. The Ice Garden followed in 2014.

Awards
- National Endowment for the Arts grant (1990)
- Radcliffe College fellowship at Harvard (1987–1988)
- Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Short Story Prize (1994)
- William Faulkner/Wisdom Award for Novella (2004)
- ATLAS grant from the State of Louisiana (2005–2006)
- Robert Penn Warren Award in Fiction, Fellowship of Southern Writers (2009)
- Philip K. Dick Award finalist (2012)
- Independent Publisher Award Gold Medal for Fiction, Southeast, for The Ice Garden (2015)

Books
- The Ice Garden
- The Not Yet
- What Gets Into Us
- Dream State
- A Period of Confinement
- The Winnebago Mysteries and Other Stories

External links
- Crone’s visual art website
- Crone’s literary website
- Short story Mr. Sender
- Image Journal: Artist of the Month feature on Moira Crone